From 1971 to 1985, battles raged over Westway, a multibillion-dollar highway, development, and park project slated for placement in New York City. It would have projected far into the Hudson River, including massive new landfill extending several miles along Manhattan's Lower West Side. The most expensive highway project ever proposed, Westway also provoked one of the highest stakes legal battles of its day. In Fighting Westway, William W. Buzbee reveals how environmentalists, citizens, their lawyers, and a growing opposition coalition, despite enormous resource disparities, were able to defeat this project supported by presidents, senators, governors, and mayors, much of the business community, and most unions. Although Westway's defeat has been derided as lacking justification, Westway's critics raised substantial and ultimately decisive objections. They questioned claimed project benefits and advocated trading federal Westway dollars for mass transit improvements. They also exposed illegally disregarded environmental risks, especially to increasingly scarce East Coast young striped bass often found in extraordinarily high numbers right where Westway was to be built.Drawing on archival records and interviews, Buzbee goes beyond the veneer of government actions and court rulings to illuminate the stakes, political pressures, and strategic moves and countermoves that shaped the Westway war, a fight involving all levels and branches of government, scientific conflict, strategic citizen action, and hearings, trials, and appeals in federal court. This Westway history illuminates how high-stakes regulatory battles are fought, the strategies and power of America's environmental laws, ways urban priorities are contested, the clout of savvy citizen activists and effective lawyers, and how separation of powers and federalism frameworks structure legal and political conflict. Whether readers seek an exciting tale of environmental, political, and legal conflict, to learn what really happened during these battles that transformed New York City, or to understand how modern legal frameworks shape high stakes regulatory wars, Fighting Westway will provide a good read. (source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780801451904 20180521

Written by one of the country's foremost urban historians, The Great Rent Wars tells the fascinating but little-known story of the battles between landlords and tenants in the nation's largest city from 1917 through 1929. These conflicts were triggered by the post-war housing shortage, which prompted landlords to raise rents, drove tenants to go on rent strikes, and spurred the state legislature, a conservative body dominated by upstate Republicans, to impose rent control in New York, a radical and unprecedented step that transformed landlord-tenant relations. The Great Rent Wars traces the tumultuous history of rent control in New York from its inception to its expiration as it unfolded in New York, Albany, and Washington, D.C. At the heart of this story are such memorable figures as Al Smith, Fiorello H. La Guardia, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as a host of tenants, landlords, judges, and politicians who have long been forgotten. Fogelson also explores the heated debates over landlord-tenant law, housing policy, and other issues that are as controversial today as they were a century ago. (source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780300191721 20190129

"In this report, Human Rights Watch offers new data indicating that people who enter the criminal justice system with an arrest for public possession of marijuana rarely commit violent crimes in the future. Over the last 15 years, New York City police have arrested more than 500,000 people - most of them young blacks or Hispanics - on misdemeanor charges of possessing small amounts of marijuana in public view. While Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the police have said the arrests have helped reduce violent crime, they have never specified how"--Publisher's website.
"Every year, New York City police arrest around 50,000 people--most of them young blacks or Hispanics--for the misdemeanor crime of possessing small amounts of marijuana in public view. New York City law enforcement and elected officials have never explained the rationale underlying why they focus so many resources on this type of misdemeanor arrest. Although some people make assertions that these arrests contribute to public safety, there has never been any empirical evidence offered in support. The disproportionate impact these arrests have on black and Hispanic city residents, as well as the fact that they consume so many scarce law enforcement and judicial resources, warrant a full, objective, and factual based explanation of this policing policy. This report analyzes the subsequent criminal histories of people who enter the New York criminal justice system with marijuana possession arrests. Based on tracking the criminal records of almost 30,000 people who had no prior criminal convictions when they were arrested for misdemeanor marijuana possession in 2003 and 2004, we find that as of June 2011, relatively few had been convicted of serious crimes: only 3.1 percent were convicted of one violent felony offense and an additional 0.4 percent had two or more violent felony convictions. Arresting and prosecuting those who commit violent crimes is a legitimate and necessary law enforcement objective. But it is not readily apparent how arresting and prosecuting 50,000 people annually for marijuana possession helps in that endeavor. If the reason is to enable the police to enter arrestees' fingerprints and other information into criminal databases so that they can identify anyone who may commit serious crimes in the future, our data indicates the police have cast too wide a net. The greater the numbers of people being arrested, and the more controversy and litigation spurred by this policing policy, the louder the absence of an official and transparent explanation becomes. Human Rights Watch calls on New York City officials to demonstrate that it has a non-discriminatory and human rights compliant policing policy in place to justify its focus on misdemeanor marijuana arrests"--Provided by publisher.

The story of one year in Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country, shown through the eyes of the men and women who experience it, not only in the courtroom but in the lockup, the jury room, the judge's chambers, the spectators' gallery.

The Juvenile Court of Memphis, founded in 1910, directed delinquent and dependent children into a variety of private charitable organizations and public correctional facilities. Drawing on the court's case files and other primary sources, Jennifer Trost explains the complex interactions between parents, children, and welfare officials in the urban South. Trost adds a personal dimension to her study by focusing on the people who appeared before the court - and not only on the legal specifics of their cases. Directed for thirty years by the charismatic and well-known chief judge Camille Kelley, the court was at once a traditional house of justice, a social services provider, an agent of state control, and a community-based mediator. Because the court saw boys and girls, blacks and whites, native Memphians and newly arrived residents with rural backgrounds, Trost is able to make subtle points about differences in these clients' experiences with the court. Those differences, she shows, were defined by the mix of Progressive and traditional attitudes that the involved parties held toward issues of class, race, and gender. Trost's insights are all the more valuable because the Memphis court had a large African American clientele. In addition, the court's jurisdiction extended beyond children engaged in criminal or otherwise unacceptable conduct to include those who suffered from neglect, abuse, or poverty. A work of legal history animated by questions more commonly posed by social historians, Gateway to Justice will engage anyone interested in how the early welfare state shaped, and was shaped by, tensions between public standards and private practices of parenting, sexuality, and race relations. (source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780820326719 20160528

The Juvenile Court of Memphis, founded in 1910, directed delinquent and dependent children into a variety of private charitable organizations and public correctional facilities. Drawing on the court's case files and other primary sources, Jennifer Trost explains the complex interactions between parents, children, and welfare officials in the urban South. Trost adds a personal dimension to her study by focusing on the people who appeared before the court - and not only on the legal specifics of their cases. Directed for thirty years by the charismatic and well-known chief judge Camille Kelley, the court was at once a traditional house of justice, a social services provider, an agent of state control, and a community-based mediator. Because the court saw boys and girls, blacks and whites, native Memphians and newly arrived residents with rural backgrounds, Trost is able to make subtle points about differences in these clients' experiences with the court. Those differences, she shows, were defined by the mix of Progressive and traditional attitudes that the involved parties held toward issues of class, race, and gender. Trost's insights are all the more valuable because the Memphis court had a large African American clientele. In addition, the court's jurisdiction extended beyond children engaged in criminal or otherwise unacceptable conduct to include those who suffered from neglect, abuse, or poverty. A work of legal history animated by questions more commonly posed by social historians, Gateway to Justice will engage anyone interested in how the early welfare state shaped, and was shaped by, tensions between public standards and private practices of parenting, sexuality, and race relations. (source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780820326719 20160528

4. Socializing the law-- Part II. Practices: Interlude: Socialized Law in Action--

5. 'Keep sober, work, and support his family': the court of domestic relations--

6. 'To protect her from the greed as well as the passions of man': the morals court--

7. 'Upon the threshold of manhood': the boys' court--

8. 'Keep the life stream pure': the psychopathic laboratory-- Part III. Misgivings:

9. America's first war on crime-- Afterword.

(source: Nielsen Book Data)

What could be more 'liberal' than the modern idea of social responsibility for crime - that crime is less the product of free will than of poverty and other social forces beyond the individual's control? And what could be more 'progressive' than the belief that the law should aim for social, not merely individual, justice? In this work of social, cultural, and legal history, Michael Willrich uncovers the contested origins and paradoxical consequences of these two protean concepts in the cosmopolitan cities of industrial America at the turn of the twentieth century. In Progressive Era Chicago, social activists, judges, and working-class families seeking justice transformed criminal courts into laboratories of progressive democracy. Willrich argues that this progressive effort to 'socialize' urban justice redefined American liberalism and the rule of law, laying an urban seedbed for the modern administrative welfare state. (source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780521790826 20160528